Re-establishing Royalty
Will Ricks ’07 works to ensure that monarch butterflies can once again thrive in the Carolinas.
By Carole Tanzer Miller
Will Ricks ’07 has a job that gives him butterflies. As a senior environmental scientist for Duke Energy’s Natural Resources Group, Ricks works to make the Carolinas more hospitable to declining pollinators, especially monarch butterflies.
More than one-third of the world’s crops depend on pollinators like butterflies, bees, bugs, birds and bats, but disappearing habitat has left many of these important species at risk. Numbers of the once-ubiquitous orange, black and white monarchs, for example, have plummeted 90 percent in recent years.
“They’re the poster children for species decline,” says Ricks, whose team traverses more than 100 sites a year in the Midwest, Florida and the Carolinas to document which species and vegetation are present. Their surveys underscore the consequences of pesticide use, development and climate change.
His focus on monarchs is part of Duke Energy’s participation in a voluntary pact involving more than 40 energy and transportation organizations that have committed to stabilizing or restoring the butterflies’ populations.
Ricks’ work at Duke has two aims: protecting critical infrastructure so power can be delivered without disruption and reducing the environmental impact of necessary maintenance and construction in compliance with regulations. Importantly, he says his surveys help front-line crews create a more hospitable habitat. That might mean removing saplings and woody plants that choke out the grasses and nectar plants that pollinators depend on or planting more of the native grasses and milkweed that monarchs adore.
“As you build it, they will come,” says Ricks, 39, who works from a home office in Roanoke Rapids, N.C. His family owns a loblolly pine farm, where, he says, “everything we do is for wildlife.”
Everything we do is for wildlife. . . . You can make a huge difference.
He’s heartened by a growing interest in helping endangered pollinators. “People ask me more times than I can count” what they can do, he says, and Ricks has a ready response: Leave some brush in the yard over the winter and toss some milkweed seed in the ground. “You can make a huge difference.”
